"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

August 25, 2016

If the U.S. presidential election were held today, Democrat Hillary Clinton would win the key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia and have a 95 percent chance of beating Republican Donald Trump to become America’s first female president, according to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project.

Facilitating Clinton's coast to victory, perhaps, is that the Trump campaign is too incompetent to even place itself on every state ballot, which suggests the "unbelievable" management skills that Mr. Trump would bring to the Oval Office.

As Donald Trump soft-pedals his once-hard-line immigration rhetoric, supporters of his vanquished primary foe Ted Cruz [with whom Kellyanne Conway was super-PAC aligned, accusing Trump of being "cozy with the establishment"] have one message for Republican voters: We told you so.

Cruz spent the final months of his unsuccessful presidential primary run arguing that Trump was a not-so-closeted liberal whose conservative language on immigration was not to be trusted….

"Everything Trump promises comes with an expiration date," said Cruz’s former Senate communications director, Amanda Carpenter. "We knew it during the primary, and now it is apparent he has duped his most loyal supporters on the issue they care about most, immigration. Don't say we didn't warn them."

Even more precious is what Politico then reports:

The Texas senator has been dealing with plenty of political fallout of his own after refusing to endorse Trump in his speech at the Republican National Convention…. But Trump’s rhetorical contortions on immigration this week are giving Cruz supporters in and around his orbit more hope that anger over the RNC speech, and over his broader opposition to Trump, will fade.

Was there ever a political development more easily predictable — and nonetheless widely, also predictably, botched by the nation's punditry? This development is coming earlier than I anticipated, but, as I observed the day after Cruz's supposedly career-ending RNC speech, it is coming:

As Sen. Cruz revealed last night, Republicans' 2020 gauntlet is lining up a wee bit early. Ted knows, just as every able Republican strategist knows, that The Donald, in November, will go down to historic humiliation and defeat. And Ted's a fast learner. What has he learned? That a Republican presidential candidate can say the most "unbelievable" and outrageously offensive things to the Republican base, he can earn their acute disapproval and censure, he can incite a deafening round of "Boos," and in rather short order the base will let it all pass; Republican voters will embrace a man who actively seeks the rolling destruction of the Republican Party.

Ted has learned this from a superb teacher. So what did he care last night if the Republican mob wanted to hang him? By November 9th, they'll be hugging him.

Earlier this morning, on MSNBC, I heard Howard Dean muse that young people are pragmatic, unlike their ideological elders.

Have I missed some sort of generational shift away from centuries of youthful idealism?

Bernie's appeal was largely rooted in the naiveté of the inexperienced: those who have yet to learn that, at worst, cynicism is generally appropriate, and, at best, pragmatism and the grinding incrementalism that comes with it are progress's only hope.

Is Howard onto some fresh, promising, youthful phenomenon that somehow has escaped me?

The press corps's Trump-watchers may be interrogating the wrong people. They're asking those attending his rallies what they think of his mild descent from Mount Jackbooted Deportation, when, somehow, they should be asking those who are now absenting themselves from his rallies.

"In a cavernous event space on the grounds of the Florida State Fairgrounds" yesterday afternoon (not the one shown), reports the Washington Post, "the venue was barely half full." The rally was preceded by 24 hours notice — abundant time to inspire a mob — and yet throughout those 24 hours, that other notice was also out: The Donald is going soft.

Those attending the Tampa rally were, as might be expected, publicly forgiving of Trump's seeming apostasy. "He’s still going to build the wall," said one. "It's not a pivot," insisted another. And yet such comments reek of self-reassurance riddled with self-doubt. Here was their fascist bonehead bowing to democratic pressures, much as little Adolf, fearing alienation of the middle class's less-bigoted swaths, reined in his anti-Semitic screeds prior to Germany's parliamentary elections.

Trump has fearlessly promised to always "tell the truth" to his equally boneheaded disciples — but now, which truth is the truth? Will he do as President Obama has done? Or will he order up a fleet of busses for the Einsatzgruppen?

I can't prove it, because I can't prove a negative, but I suspect those empty fairground seats were filled by disembodied disgust. Just as Trump was swearing that he'd never "pivot," the neofascist baboon was swinging from limb to limb, and performing triple axels in between. He would deport but he wouldn't deport, and, turns out, among all those rapists and other criminals are some pretty good people. What are old sieg-heilers to do, other than back away, or rather stay away?

Trump's only consistency is that he remains notoriously incoherent. For most of us, 15 months of this are enough, more than enough; what was once a marvel of gibberish has become a monotony. For others, a few others, 15 concluded months of unintelligibility appear to be the starting point of melancholy. For them, it seems that seeping into Trump's gibberish is an element of discomforting moderation. Does this in fact account for the empty seats? Again, I can't say for sure, but I suspect it does.

My one bit of empirical evidence (other than the empty seats themselves) is the shockingly coherent gibberish of Ann Coulter. "Why are we talking about softening the lives of lawbreakers?" she asked of Chris Matthews earlier this week. "I think this is a mistake. This sounds like it’s coming from consultants" — and if it persists, added the author of In Trump We [Somewhat] Trust, hers will be "the shortest book tour ever."

Coulter speaks for the Steve Bannon faction of Trump's base, which is just about all Trump has. The groaning, straining, semi-rational Kellyanne Conway faction (which understands that one needs votes to win an election) is making its move — and this, at least, portends some internal fireworks down the road. Bannon and Conway are as incompatible as Trump and Everett Dirksen. The two are scorpions in a bottle loaded with matches and dynamite.

That, anyway, is the way I prefer at present to interpret this oddly monotonous horror of a "campaign." For that would give me something more to write about, for how many times can one note, with any lingering interest, Trump's incoherence?

August 24, 2016

I doubt Hillary would have a problem with Roger Simon's proposal, either:

Trump thundered on Monday that we need an immediate investigation into the Clinton Foundation by a special prosecutor. I don’t have any problem with that. But let’s have a special prosecutor investigate Trump’s tax returns at the same time.

The title of Simon's piece is "Tired of our current universe? Try joining Trump," which Simon borrowed from Hillary: "I do feel at times this campaign has entered into an alternative universe," said Clinton, also on Monday. "I think we all know how she feels," adds Simon. I know I do.

In commentary mode I haven't covered that many presidential contests. This one was supposed to be my fifth, and I was looking forward to it. Yet, as of 9 November, I still will have covered only four, since Trump's alternative universe, by definition, excludes his "candidacy" from the realm of the earthly, the known, the experiential.

I had, at a minimum, counted on Trump ramping up the very ugliest in presidential-campaign history. He has failed me. His campaign is less ugly than just a joke — and an increasingly boring joke at that. The man is "shocking" only in that he's the Republican nominee. His ignorance, his hypocrisies, his deceits and racist appeals lost their shock value long ago.

*And a Trump without shock value in this presidential race is as good as no Trump at all.

In "The Age of Post-Truth Politics," William Davies, a University of London political economy professor, writes:

As politics becomes more adversarial and dominated by television performances, the status of facts in public debate rises too high. We place expectations on statistics and expert testimony that strains them to breaking point. Rather than sit coolly outside the fray of political argument, facts are now one of the main rhetorical weapons within it.

One nearly ubiquitous criticism of the American right is that it's resistant to facts. This is an unfair criticism, for as Davies notes, Whose facts? "[E]xperts and agencies involved in producing facts have multiplied," observes Davies, "and many are now for hire. If you really want to find an expert willing to endorse a fact, and have sufficient money or political clout behind you, you probably can." You bet your self-serving butt you can. Just dial up or hire Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation or Steve Bannon's Government Accountability Institute or any of the leporinelike-propagating, right-wing "think tanks." Give them a predetermined fact and they'll substantiate it. Not a problem.

In fact, the American far right's propensity to embrace "facts" has a rather long history. I love op-eds such as Prof. Davies', for they provide me the opportunity to extensively quote that seminal diagnostician of right-wing lunacy, Richard Hofstadter:

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions….

The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry….

[T]he paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence"….

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s [the John Birch Society's] incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies.

And so it remains: experts, footnotes, and bibliographies on the folly of global warming, on the splendors of trickle-down economics, on the mysterious past of Barack Obama, on the sordid history and scandalous present of Crooked Hillary … ad infinitum. The far, chronically paranoid right positively adores facts; it possesses them by the oodles, and it's plenty willing to share them.

The center is where the two ends collide, from left and right, which is what makes the center the most interesting place to be.

It's easy but rather dull to be on, and stay on, the left; it's just as easy as staying on the right. Ideologically, I happen to be on the farther end of the left — not the extreme left, but probably farther than your modern, garden-variety progressivism — and my opinions would be far less tangled and, on occasion, less arduously expressed were I to pitch my tent on sentimental ideological ground and stay put. Pragmatically, however, I would bore myself to stupors. Political progress takes place on the pluralistic battlefield, not back in the ideological camps. Heroic action figures intent on effective engagement have always appreciated this and have, in turn, adopted some of the enemy's ideological characteristics: FDR, Nixon, Obama, Reagan, to name just a few — all, at times, were as conservative as they were progressive; as progressive as they were conservative. Otherwise, the thrill of engagement would have been lost to self-satisfaction, and nothing would have gotten done. And so I resist 100 percentism.

Another reason I pragmatically subscribe to centrism (again, pragmatic, not ideological centrism) is that pious ideological camps tend to be populated by — let's just say it — crackpots. This phenomenon is self-evident on the right (or at least it's self-evident to those of us on the left). The Palins, the Cruzes, the Bannons are a fascinating but offputting, ghoulish bunch who dwell in what is commonly designated the fever swamp. On the left we have, most prominently, Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, the former of whom recently degraded my beloved and fundamentally pragmatic democratic socialism by converting it into a wholly unrealizable fantasy. In brief, he took democratic socialism into crackpot territory, promising overnight fixes to sempiternal problems.

Sen. Sanders now has an even bigger problem than having lost the primary race. Only a self-satisfied crackpot would so blindly proceed in the way he's proceeded, which, as the NY Times reports, has ignited a revolt within his political revolution:

While the establishment of [his] new group, Our Revolution, has been eagerly awaited by many of his most ardent supporters, it has been met with criticism and controversy over its financing and management.

A principal concern among backers of Mr. Sanders, whose condemnation of the campaign finance system was a pillar of his presidential bid, is that the group can draw from the same pool of "dark money" that Mr. Sanders condemned for lacking transparency.

The announcement of the group, which will be livestreamed Wednesday night, also comes as the majority of its staff resigned after the appointment last Monday of Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s former campaign manager, to lead the organization.

Who would have thought it? you might sarcastically ask. A rebellion against Weaver, a man of no identifiable charm whatsoever? And a revolt against Our Revolution as a 501(c)(4), perhaps the most targeted anathema of Sanders's entire campaign? Only crackpots can't see outside their self-fashioned bubbles.

And then there is Dr. Stein, who is similarly bubbling with self-unaware, crackpotted derailments. Yesterday, relates Dana Milbank, "she accused the famed leftist" and Stein-supporter Noam Chomsky "of being cowardly," since the good professor has possessed the good sense to urge a nation-saving vote for Hillary Clinton in swing states. The Green Party nominee, groans Milbank, is pushing "a phony equivalence between Clinton, a flawed and unloved but conventional candidate, and Trump, who is running a campaign of bigotry, xenophobia and intimations of violence." And that, as they say, is just nuts.

Thus even if your leftist host were inclined to decamp from pragmatic centrism, where in the name of political sanity would I go? To His Revolution headed up by both a smug martinet and an unreconstructed fabulist? To a demagogic physician (Stein also sensationally claims that Clinton exposed "top secret" intel in her emails) unable to recognize the difference between traditional coalition politics and goofy cryptofascism?

Thank you, no. Pragmatically I am left with centrism — that most interesting of places, where the two ends collide.

After bragging for a year about how cheaply he was running his campaign, Donald Trump is spending more freely now that other people are contributing ― particularly when the beneficiary is himself.

Trump nearly quintupled the monthly rent his presidential campaign pays for its headquarters at Trump Tower to $169,758 in July, when he was raising funds from donors, compared with March, when he was self-funding his campaign [and paying rent of $35,458].

WaPo's Richard Cohen is in a stew about the Donald's "rigged election" whoops, which, pace Cohen, delight me to no end, since the more his minions buy in to this risible crap, the less reason they have to bother with voting.

At any rate, Cohen observes:

The GOP has already done considerable damage to the faith Americans once had in their government. It is time for the party to say, "Enough!" Republicans who have been on the fence about Trump — party leaders such as the occasionally principled Reince Priebus — have got to call a halt to this nonsense. Their enduring concern is too narrow. They should worry more about their country and less about their party.

Reince Priebus is as "occasionally principled" as Al Capone was, what with his admirable Great Depression soup kitchens, tainted only by systematic murder.

As for Cohen's more general observation — that GOP capos should scream "Enough!" — well, I ceased believing in the party's resurrected decency (at least in 2016) some time ago. The GOP is, at last, utterly soulless. It is lost. And continued prayers for cries of "Enough!" are just so much voodooism.

I recall writing, roughly a decade ago, that the Bush administration's unconscionable abuse of American firepower could someday have the paradoxical effect of inhibiting legitimate interventionism. Domestic backlash was incubating a broad reluctance to "get involved" in others' troubles, and the next president, I speculated, might very well withhold the kind of interventionism that could do some humanitarian good. The body politic wouldn't tolerate what could become yet another sinkhole.

I of course had no idea of where, or why, this might occur. The human atrocity of Syria wasn't yet on our living-room screens. But the paradox did unfold; neoconservatism, through its unrelenting recklessness, proved an enemy to itself.

The same phenomenon might someday occur in the event of Clintonian "crimes." For a quarter-century Republicans have unleashed a ceaseless barrage against all things Clinton, both husband and wife, tha latter of whom remains partisanly convicted of whatever one wishes her guilty of. Hillary, we're told, is a harpy of unprecedented malevolence. Name a crime and she's committed it, from commodities fraud to murdering a family friend.

Stunning it is that such a conspicuous malefactor could have evaded the long, muscular arm of justice for so long — but by God she has. On the other hand, if Republicans simply sustain their scrutiny of Hillary Clinton's criminal activities, well, someday she'll take the fall.

What could instead unfold, however, is a paradox of overkill, of partisan recklessness, of unconscionable abuse of political firepower. American voters don't trust Hillary in a vague, general way. This is unsurprising, given the aforementioned, propagandistic barrage. And yet with each new specific charge of Hillary's limitless skulduggery, American voters are merely apt to yawn.

Presently, the American way of life is under siege (as the partisan story goes) because HRC once used a private email system to conduct mundane State Department business. And, heaven forfend, her aides — one of them with a funny-sounding and indeed suspiciously unAmerican name, Huma Abedin — once attempted to satisfy (or resisted satisfying) Clinton Foundation requests in the service of horrifying intentions.

There was, for instance, the hooking up of Tony Blair's wife with the wife of Qatar's emir, or — and this one, hands down, rivals history's "corrupt bargains," whiskey rings, teapotted domes, and Nixonian villainy so vast as to defy any efficient description — securing a timely visa for a British soccer player.

It is precisely this sort on unendurable malfeasance that prompted the Republican "presidential" nominee to call, yesterday, for a special prosecutor to "investigate Hillary Clinton's crimes," and prompted as well the House Oversight Committee's chairman to demand that the FBI explain its obviously nefarious redactions of Hillary's emails.

Hers is also precisely the kind of unendurable malfeasance that has American voters yawning by the millions. What we have is less Clinton fatigue than — Enough already with Republican hysterics.

Presidential history has shown us that it is far from inconceivable that President Hillary Clinton could someday commit a legitimately unendurable transgression. And yet Republicans have cried "Criminal bitch!" so many times the body politic is, if that day ever comes, likely to yawn. Voters might react to any such transgression as just another vacuous sinkhole of Republican overreach.

August 22, 2016

A RARE DAY OFF, PERHAPS

First I want to thank all of you who left such kind remarks about Saturday's nerve-racking miracle that made today's event possible: my daughter's departure for year of study abroad, which, as I write, is making for quite the bittersweet day. I'm delighted and depressed, but I won't go into all that, since I'm sure you can well imagine it for yourself.

Off to the airport in a few minutes. I may be back later today, I may not. I'm leaning toward "not" at the moment. On the other hand, I may desperately want something — as a distraction — to do.

***

The school she'll be attending (original structure built in 1536):

***

St. Christopher stalks my feckless ass, I just know it, either because I'm not Catholic, or not religious at all.

After damn near having to alert the National Guard last week to secure my daughter's visa, at the eleventh hour, in USPS transit, I (we) get to the airline's check-in this morning, certain that the gods are finally with me. All my sins had been forgiven. Clean slate, right? No. Naturally, there's a problem — immediately. "ERROR," says the airline's computer; passenger is too young (17) to travel alone and the computer doesn't recognize the visa number. Resolving this (calls were made to the airlines's "Seventeen-Year-Olds & Visas Department") took a half-hour. Then comes baggage check-in: three bags total — first is free, second bag and all additional bags, we had been informed, are $100 apiece. Wrong. First bag is indeed free, and the second bag is indeed $100, but the third bag is $285, not $100. Now I owe the airline $385. Whatcha gonna do? So I hand the check-in guy a credit card. "Declined." I'm back to mild panic (see: last week). Must be some glitch with that card, I think. I hand him another card. "Declined." Now my panic moves from mild to moderate/severe. I call the first credit card people (we're still standing there at check-in) and I am put on hold (30 minutes), having been directed to the fraud department, which had blocked my card because the charge was being processed as a charge in Atlanta, Georgia, which is more than 600 miles from where I should be. Unblocking the card and "forcing" a remote, one-time charge is, ultimately, successful. Then I'm emailed by the second credit card people, who are wondering if I'm aware that some miscreant is trying to bilk me out of $385. But not to worry! Because they've blocked my card.

OK, Chris, you've just about worn me down. Send me the catechism. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to keep you from further stalking my feckless ass.

August 21, 2016

I haven't yet decided which is most applicable to the gothic scholasticism of Republican strategists: admiration, awe, or pity.

"A lot of Republican commentators and analysts … want to make the argument we have to stand up against [Trump] on principle," observes s Senate strategist to The Hill. "The problem with that is if you do so, you end up taking out really good Republicans" — of high principles, one presumes.

We have seen how this curious convolution works in practice. The lowest order of selling one's political soul is to announce that one will vote for the party's nominee, but one heroically draws the line at endorsing the party's nominee. The much higher order of such Faustian fustian is to concede with metronomic regularity that one's presidential nominee is a dolt, a clueless twit, an unqualified schmuck, a racist hooligan, a serial mountebank, an absolute horror of a man-child who has no business even pardoning a turkey, let alone possessing the nuclear codes — but, one does indeed support him.

What we have here, of course, is a professed turn from ethereal ethics to earthy American pragmatism, hence one can still claim to somewhat reside in the divine realm of philosophy. Trump-tolerating Republican strategists argue that "turning off the party from the presidential nominee will only depress GOP turnout in November." And what conscientious partisan wants that? No, a bit of practical compromise is called for: to do good, they must take the bad with the good; in bluntest terms — whatever works.

That phrase, "whatever works," is often embraced as the essence — the singular essence — of American pragmatism. The embrace, however, is a degradation of the ism. William James would be appalled to see his seminal philosophy reduced to the practical politics of enduring a human blight such as Trump.

The former meant, in his early 20th-centiry lectures and writings, to locate an intellectual space between idealism (often, dogmatism) and rootless materialism. He borrowed from both, which is to say, he and other principled pragmatists saw their philosophy of practicality as one nonetheless endowed by human decency, human values, even by what I'm reluctant to call human morality (possibly inspired by the ethereal). What's more, none of it was worth a bucket of warm whatever if it wasn't geared toward the humanly productive.

And nothing could be less conceptually productive than the incontestable horror of a President Trump — the very definition of blighted humanity.

In brief, authentic pragmatism can't always mean "whatever works." It must be grounded in principles. And not even Herr Hegel could synthesize Trump's boundlessly unprincipled character with Republican strategists' exaltation of others' fundamental principles. These just can't be squared. Trying to square them or defend the attempt is unproductive, which further means pragmatically oriented, Trump-tolerating Republican strategists are, paradoxically, being quite unpragmatic.

August 20, 2016

AN ABOVE-THE-HEADLINE POSTSCRIPT

What have I learned today? I already knew I don't like to lose. Thus what I learned was that if one perseveres and calls the United States Postal Service from Washington D.C. to Chicago to various local post offices and regional distribution centers it is possible to intercept an envelope in transit. I should think by now the USPS has, nationwide, blocked my phone number. And that's fine. Because I won. We have the visa! And so my daughter's Monday flight is secure.

This all began because I disconnected one of my two landlines…. when I asked for one landline to be disconnected, somehow the company also disconnected the DSL on the other landline. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s how it started. Now for the last month, Verizon has randomly disconnected my internet, and I spend hours on the phone trying to get it back….

I know it’s not a good idea to hate anyone. I know from an article I read that negative emotions are bad for my health. I would hate to have a heart attack because my internet isn’t working. But I do hate Verizon.

I spent four hours on the phone with the company on a recent Saturday morning. I know for sure I was disconnected three times.

I already had a reserved place in my heart for Delia, since my daughter, Ellie, once co-starred in a community-theatre production of her and Nora Ephron's Off-Broadway play, "Love, Loss, and What I Wore." Ellie was only 14 at the time and yet she played an adult role because her audition, the director told me, was that mature, that good. Delia's playwriting made me even more proud of my daughter. I now possess another place in my heart for Delia, for I too hate Verizon. And Mediacom. And visa-coordinating, private travel agencies. And consulates. And like Delia, I am also "feeling crazy that I [am] getting so upset about this" — all of it.

At some point during my day on the phone with Verizon, at least two hours in, I had to go through all their prompts again. I yelled at the prompts. Prompts are sinister, because after Verizon disconnects you, you have to call back and obey the rules to get to anyone again.

My dear Delia, I once spent three hours on the phone with Verizon — mostly going through prompts after redialing after being disconnected by, presumably, a human — trying to give them money. One would think Verizon would be eager to swaddle callers who are trying to give them money. (In my case, the first payment for my daughter's cell-phone service). But no, the faceless, disembodied bastards threw themselves into the aforementioned sinister work of customer abuse.

And my dear Delia, my, dear, dear Delia, one month of "randomly disconnected" internet service? Try coping with Mediacom's "service" for 10 years. That organized crime outfit trained Verizon's technical and customer-service staffs, I know it, I just know it. I also know as well as you, Delia, that it's not a good idea to hate anyone; that's it's bad for my health. But I do hate Mediacom. Like Fat Clemenza, I have hated those goddamn Barzinis so long and so much, the hatred has become a characterological part of me.

I now hate visa-coordinating travel agencies and foreign consulates, too. They — all of them — are on my enemies list.

"This all began because" I wanted my daughter to enjoy a year of study abroad, in a foreign language, which she has wanted since early childhood. She has a Monday morning flight booked. For eight months we've known where that flight is going — France, as part of an enormous, long-existing exchange program — and so for six months we acquired the paperwork and completed the paperwork and submitted the paperwork, piece by agonizing piece, to the visa-coordinating agency. Twelve days before her flight she still had no visa.

Inquiries were made. We learned the agency had submitted her paperwork and passport and itinerary to the French consulate — and that was that. No follow-up. So, in immense frenzy, we followed up ourselves with the consulate, calling and emailing and forwarding an overnight, pre-paid, required USPS return envelope — you know, for the visa, the visa, which had long been approved but (we belatedly discovered) never paid for, and therefore never "officially" processed. Finally, this Wednesday, all was paid for and processed, whereupon we were told by the increasingly curt consulate that the visa would be overnighted Friday morning in the overnight envelope we had provided. It was indeed overnighted, except it wasn't, which I learned last night on the USPS's tracking site. Somehow, the overnight envelope was marked "2-day" express: scheduled delivery time, Monday afternoon, four hours post-flight departure.

Today I'm attempting an intercept of the non-overnighted visa/passport at a USPS way-station. If successful we will have re-secured my daughter's passport and obtained visa in hand with less than 48 hours to go. There is no guarantee, however, that the visa/passport will arrive at the way-station before closing time today, 5 p.m. In that event we will need to stop at the way-station Monday — 7:30 a.m. opening time — on the way to the airport an hour away; flight time, 11:30 a.m, three-hour prior arrival strongly advised. All of which would mean that eight months of our meticulous preparation will come down, literally, to one or two minutes of the closest cutting.

Delia, I hope this makes you feel better. I appreciate that mine are what the kids now call "first-world problems," nonetheless I have become a despairing old grouch, furious at that world, before my time. To paraphrase an even older Charles Barsotti New Yorker cartoon, I blame government, big business, unions, and my first wife. They have all conspired — I'm sure of it — to make this week a fresh, living hell.

"Look, we don't — there isn't a lot of trust with Iran," said State Department spokesman John Kirby this morning. "So it would have been foolish and imprudent in our view to go ahead and settle the cash payment of the principal when we didn't have our Americans back."

That "cash payment of the principal"? It was a legally obligated payment, which would be another unfathomable aspect of any true, hostages-for-money scheme.

Finally, as I tweeted last night:

There, I'm glad I got all that off my chest.

Now, with scrambled brain and fried nerves I can return to anguishing about what seems like my daughter's visa being held hostage (her international flight is, as I write, a mere 72 hours — 7 business hours — away), and pondering how large of a bad check I'd write to free it. But wait, since it would be a bad check anyway, why not $400 million?

So, I stand ready with plenty of ransom funny-money. But leverage? Of that, I'm afraid, I have not a nickel's worth.

Manafort said [Bannon and Conway's hiring made for] an "exciting day for Team Trump".... He added that he will provide the "big picture, long- range campaign vision" that will guide the campaign to victory in November.

Fareed Zakaria picks up today where I left off yesterday. "We are left to wonder," I wrote, "why so many [white voters, especially men] — even given the brainwashing and bubbles and cultural-economic shifts — can't recognize such an obvious fraud" as Trump." Writes Zakaria, "Given his obvious lack of qualifications, his absurd proposals, his hypocrisy, his obnoxious rhetoric, his sheer incompetence as a candidate, why is [Trump] not down 10 points in every state?"

That much we know from a demographic angle, with the answer lying in the initial brackets above. Zakaria's wonder about "why do they stick with him?" persists, though, as does mine. Seeking an answer, the Washington Post columnist cites, as I did, J.D. Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy. "The book has rocketed up the best-seller lists — deservedly so. But," adds Zakaria, "it has some interesting and important gaps." And one of those gaps, however indirectly, almost certainly goes to the why:

When speaking about the almost pathological suspicion his hillbillies have for Barack Obama. Vance explains that it is because of the president’s accent — "clean, perfect, neutral" — his urban background, his success in the meritocracy, his reliability as a father. "And," one wants to whisper to Vance, "because he’s black." After all, over the years the white working class has voted for plenty of Republican and Democratic candidates with fancy degrees and neutral accents. That’s not what makes Obama different.

The white working class has always derived some of its status because there was a minority underclass below it. In his seminal work, American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmund Morgan argues that even before the revolution, the introduction of slavery helped dampen class conflict within the white population. No matter how poor you were, there was security in knowing there was someone beneath you.

Edmund Morgan's work is among the finest in American historiography. If you've never eagerly turned the pages of a history volume before, you just might with this one, for Morgan was a brilliant stylist. And whatever professional criticism American Slavery, American Freedom has met over the years, its fundamental thesis remains embraced: white lower-class racism has its roots in what America's upper class once successfully sold to the former — At least you're better than the enslaved of color. Hence the paradox of Freedom's coexistence with Slavery; the latter allowed all whites to see themselves as social equals, which, as Zakaria notes, reduced class conflict, which would otherwise endanger the upper class's political position.

What does this have to do with Trump's base, and why, as reported (till now), it sticks with him? It has to do with "linkage," of course. Hillary Clinton worked for, and is about to succeed, a black man. And how does Trump repeatedly frame that man? As "stupid," incompetent, shiftless in duty, essentially inferior not only to the plutocratic virtues of Trump, but, reaching back through the centuries, inferior to all whites as some sort of "other" ("there is," after all, "something going on"). Rarely does the name Obama escape The Donald's little duck lips without tying it to the name of Clinton. Obama and Clinton are a Trumpian package for an ancient reason — a reason that has more to do with racism than just politics (such as when Obama repeatedly tied John McCain to George W. Bush). Hillary is, in effect, being sold by Trump as a stupid, incompetent, shiftless-in-duty, essentially inferior black woman.

The upside? Trump's white working-class base, predominantly male, is sticking with him less and less; his racial politics, it seems, lack the potency they once held. Perhaps our wonder and the disgust that comes with it can ease up a bit: even once-racially motivated white working-class males are beginning to grasp, as Zakaria puts it, Trump's obvious lack of qualifications, absurd proposals, hypocrisy, obnoxious rhetoric, and sheer incompetence.

The Breitbart philosophy revolves around the core belief that a wildly corrupt ruling class, of both parties, has abandoned American workers in favor of policies that line its own pockets and the pockets of corporate interests. And its white-hot anger stems from how the leading institutions of American life have engineered all sorts of arrangements hostile to American workers: trade deals that favor the interest of large multinational companies over American workers, open-border policies that serve the needs of agro-businesses at the expense of low-wage Americans, and, more generally, a set of globalist policies that support transnational business interests without regard for the deteriorating status and position of middle America.

I can entirely understand a white working-class male being of the opinion that America's political ruling class is "wildly corrupt," has abandoned its workers, is lining its own pockets, is a tool of corporate interests, and so on. What I cannot understand — not completely, anyway — is why any white working-class male would be of the opinion that Donald Trump, a conspicuous sociopath of so many equally conspicuous corporate and personal cons, would be the ideal man to selflessly battle all this wild corruption, ruling-class indifference to workers, and corporate pocket-lining.

One can write off the working class's embrace of Trump to ignorance, Fox News/talk-radio brainwashing, epistemic closure, or even to the gently delivered examinations of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which recaptures, in a way, the "forgotten man" thesis of the Great Depression. To me all of this, either separately or together, still fails to explain the appeal of Trump. That doesn't make Trump a mystery: the man is, as noted, a conspicuously flat, one-dimensional fraud. It does, however, leave white working-class males as a profound mystery. We are left to wonder why so many — even given the brainwashing and bubbles and cultural-economic shifts — can't recognize such an obvious fraud.